politics, theory, action

September 25, 2018

t was a scene straight out of the 1950s, but the year was 2017. Travis Allen, a Republican from southern California, took to the floor of the state assembly on 8 May to denounce communism. “To allow subversives and avowed communists to now work for the state of California,” he railed, “is a direct insult to the people of California who pay for that government.”

Allen was speaking out against a move to remove language from the California code that that bars members of the Communist party from holding government jobs in the state.

Anti-communist language remains on the books in several states, and in California, at least, it’s not going anywhere. After facing backlash from Republicans, veterans and the Vietnamese American community, the bill’s sponsor, the Democratic assemblyman Rob Bonta, announced last week that he would not move forward with the bill.

...

Lest there be any misunderstanding: members of the Communist party are currently allowed to hold government jobs in every American state. Such laws were passed around the country during the so-called red scare of the 20th century, but they have long since been ruled unconstitutional by the supreme court.

The applicant cannot become a citizen if they are a member of the Communist party or have been within the past 10 years, have advocated communism’s establishment in the US, have published or circulated “subversive” materials advocating communism, or are affiliated with any groups that do so.

The restriction stems from the 1952 McCarran-Walter Act (also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act) which collected and reorganized immigration law. It has been amended since its original passing, but Section 313, which bans members of the Communist party, remains.

August 30, 2018

#APSA2018 This morning I got to meet some of the courageous workers from Unite Here Local 26. Many are over 60 years old. Next to me is the brave and dynamic Mei Leung. Many of the employees have worked in this hotel for over 30 years. They have taken care of hotel guests for decades, but Marriott isn't offering them a retirement package that will take care of them. It's trying to bring in private vendors to undercut wages. And it is engaging in a cynical green campaign that cuts the hours of the cleaning staff so that they lose their health insurance. Fortunately, they are energized and united. They will fight and they will win.

Stand with Unite Here today: meet in the lobby of the Sheraton at 1:00 to send Marriott a message. One job should be enough.

August 27, 2018

The American Political Science Association is providing cover and legitimacy for policies of torture, rendition, and aggressive war. Some of members of the association have drafted a letter opposing the award being given to Condolezza Rice. If you are an APSA member and would like to add your name, please let me know.

By giving the 2018 Hubert H. Humphrey Award to Condeleeza Rice the APSA has honored a person who actively participated in creating a rationale for the illegal invasion of Iraq, participated in and defended the creation of policies of rendition and torture against foreign nationals, supported the creation of a concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay, and aided and abetted the deliberate and systematic lies that were told to the American public to encourage their support for the invasion of Iraq, which, from its inception and to this day, has had catastrophic consequences for the world.

The committee members who recommended Rice for the award have responded to our inquiry concerning their reasoning with a statement that argues that while Rice indeed participated in the disastrous foreign policy of the Bush years, her action and that of her fellow members of the administration was taken in the heat of war, with incomplete information, and with urgent responses needed. They also argue that this record is overmatched by her other services to the country, especially noting the reunification of Germany while serving in the first Bush administration and her promotion of policies of development aid under the second. Finally, they point to the person for whom the award is named, and in an act of “what-about-ism” so popular these days, suggest that politics at the highest levels involves inevitable decisions that can, in retrospect, be seen as mistaken.

As political scientists we will long argue about decisions concerning war and peace, power and its limits, and questions concerning the difficult questions of when to act and how. But we are protesting this award because we believe that no one who actively supported and defended policies of deception that led to the death of well over a million people, that created ecological danger still not fully assessed, and that resulted in the torture of other human beings should be given an award.

The committee decided to weigh Rice’s other services against this huge and disastrous failure. But it is not a matter of weight here. Given her record, she should not have been considered for an award. Participation in the governmental administration of torture should be disqualifying. For the APSA to provide cover for officials pursuing such actions violates our professional responsibilities regarding public service.

We urge the APSA to establish an oversight committee that reviews the credentials and records of those who are nominated for public service awards, so as to screen out those who have participated in policies that have had the consequence of the systematic violation of the human rights of others. We also ask that the council rescind this year’s Humphrey Award to Professor Rice, given her record of support for torture and rendition.

September 07, 2017

In Fantasyland: How American Went Haywire, Kurt Andersen spends several paragraphs trashing me. He attacks my 1998 book, Aliens in America and then adds some red-baiting for the win. But rather than providing evidence of some kind of leftist contempt for reason, what he proves is that he either can't read or is a liar.

First: he says I was "delighted on principle" to "defend the veracity of people claiming to be not just witnesses but abductees." What I actually say is that "the advocatory conventions of the UFO discourse have expanded to defend the veracity of people claiming to be not just witnesses but abductees." The paragraph is describing the ways that UFO discourse in the 1980s differs from that in the 1960s. In the 1950s and 1960s, there were scientific and governmental investigations of UFOs that had a degree of legitimacy. For example, there was a Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects held by the House Science and Astronautics Committee in July 1968. In 1966 Gerald Ford wrote a letter to the House Armed Services Committee criticizing the Air Force for dismissing a bunch of Michigan sitings. Likewise in the 50s and 60s, most UFO researchers wanted to keep "contactees" at arms-length. Their claims were considered too wild, beyond the pale, likely hoaxes. By the eighties, the kinds of methods and testimonies prominent in UFO research had changed. Hypnosis was used to recover memories said to be memories of abduction. Andersen either can't read for context (including an entire sentence), doesn't understand how to read a history of a changing discourse, or is deliberately taking me out of context so as to have an easy punching bag. I expect the latter (but this might be too generous -- why choose?).

Second: Andersen says I "celebrate" "every attitude and approach that appalls [sic] him." Celebrate? Aliens in America is dark, depressing, an account of the collapse of the conditions of possibility of democracy. It reads the nineties in terms of paranoia, what I will later with Zizek call the "decline of symbolic efficiency." Instead of either a postmodern embrace of a multitude of language games or a Habermasian insistence on the commensurability of languages, I accept the former as an unbearable condition that democratic theorists have failed to acknowledge. UFO belief and the UFO discourse is the example, case study, and symptom I use to make the argument. In his attack, Andersen renders as my opinion or position what is actually my description of the way UFO discourse functions. So he says I reject the presumption that there is a public anchored in reason. What I point out is that this presumption no longer holds in the US -- the fragmentation, the competing conceptions of the real, the fact that there is no set of common standards to which all agree -- is the condition we are in. My statement is descriptive, not normative. I write:

"UFO belief thus challenges the presumption that there is some 'public' that shares a notion of reality, a concept of reason, and a set of criteria by which claims to reason and rationality are judged."

In light of the Right's failure to acknowledge climate change, this passage isn't just accurate -- it's prescient.

Third: Andersen says that I claim that the norms of public reason are "oppressive and exclusionary." Again, he takes a phrase out of context. What I write is:

"Various Marxists, feminists, and multiculturalists have stressed the importance of knowledge gained at the margins; the importance of the standpoint of the oppressed as epistemologically superior falsely disembedded view from nowhere."

I link this view to the position that one can never really know the position of another person and the conclusion that this means that we cannot and should not judge what another person claims to know or experience. Then I criticize it. Andersen attributes to me a view I explicitly criticize. I point out that the problem of multiple ways of knowing is that it is depoliticizing because it is epistemologically confused: there are no common standard, no common reality. At the end of the twentieth century, we were awash in information, with no capacity to judge or assess it because there is no general reality, common reason. The political problem is then how to deal with this absence of a symbolic order.

Fourth: Andersen fails to understand any of my points regarding links, conspiracy theory, and paranoia. I argue that in a setting marked by the absence of a common sense of reason, problems are not solved by more information or knowledge. This is because there is not an underlying truth according to which information and knowledge can be assessed. Adding more and more information thus exacerbates rather than solves problems, especially political problems. In the late nineties, this problem was associated with data glut, search engine design, problems of verification. To an extent, we've let our technologies solve it for us. But it still comes up a lot in politics, often deployed by the Right to block action: we need more information because the science of climate change isn't settled. We also sometimes use it when we don't want to accept information we don't like: a second and third and fourth opinion following a bad diagnosis. At any rate, my argument in Aliens is that under the conditions of the absence of a common reason more information will never decide for us.

Fifth: Andersen ends by pointing out that I am a communist and making a gesture to Goebbels. This is the all too conventional obfuscatory move of equating communism and Nazism. It's used by those who are weak thinkers and politically suspect. Andersen is both.

April 25, 2017

So what are the prospects for the articulation of a protest movement based on the model of an "and" - as though inclusion at any cost were its primary goal? In relation to what is the political concatenation organized? Why actually? Which goals and criteria have to be formulated - even if they might not be so popular? And does there not have to be a much more radical critique of the articulation of ideology using pictures and sounds? Does not a conventional form mean a mimetic clinging to the conditions that are to be critiqued, a populist form of blind faith in the power of the addition of arbitrary desires? Is it not therefore sometimes better to break the chains, than to network everyone with everyone else at all costs?

March 25, 2017

All the oppressed and exploited classes throughout the history of human societies have always been forced (and it is in this that their exploitation consists) to give up to their oppressors, first, their unpaid labour and, second, their women as concubines for the “masters”. Slavery, feudalism and capitalism are identical in this respect. It is only the form of exploitation that changes; the exploitation itself remains. An exhibition of the work of “women exploited at home” has opened in Paris, the “capital of the world”, and the centre of civilisation. Each exhibit has a little tag showing how much the woman working at home receives for making it, and how much she can make per day and per hour on this basis. And what do we find? Not on a single article can a woman working at home earn more than 1.25 francs, i.e., 50 kopeks, whereas the earnings on the vast majority of jobs are very much smaller. Take lampshades. The pay is 4 kopeks per dozen. Or paper bags: 15 kopeks per thousand, with earnings at six kopeks an hour. Here are little toys with ribbons, etc.: 2.5 kopeks an hour. Artificial flowers: two or three kopeks an hour. Ladies’ and gentlemen’s underwear: from two to six kopeks an hour. And so on, without end. Our workers’ associations and trade unions, too, ought to organise an “exhibition” of this kind. It will not yield the colossal profits brought in by the exhibitions, of the bourgeoisie. A display of proletarian women’s poverty and indigence will bring a different benefit: it will help wage-slaves, both men and women, to understand their condition, look back over their “life”, ponder the conditions for emancipation from this perpetual yoke of want, poverty, prostitution and every kind of outrage against the have-nots.

March 23, 2017

The review is critical -- so critical that the author doesn't even get the title right. Nor does he get the title right of one of my other books that he mentions.

Here is my response (fortunately, a Facebook friend was able to recover it):

Hi Luke, thanks for the thoughtful review. My 2009 book is called Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies.

As you know, definitions are not always useful since most of our concepts have histories. The concept of the crowd that I use comes primarily from LeBon (a temporary collective being) and is expanded via Canetti (especially with respect to the egalitarian discharge). Crowds don't have to be spontaneous; they can be organized and produced. I talk about mobs on pp. 7-8, and refer briefly to some of that literature. As I note, the 19th century opens up the discussion of whether a crowd is a mob or the people. This is a political question, a matter of struggle and debate. This struggle is always necessarily situated -- what is opened up, what is possible? Some commentators always mistrust the people, always render the crowd as a mob. Others find possibility.

I don't deconstruct the idea of individual interests because I am more interested in rejecting the individual form altogether. You write: "Dean wants to argue that intelligible interests can be attributed to collectives" -- that description doesn't ring true to me since I don't use the language of interests. Instead, with respect to the crowd I use Canetti to speak of the discharge as the moment of equality that gives the crowd its substance.

You say I don't give concrete historical examples of the party -- but chapter 3 discusses Lenin's account of the party and chapter 5 talks about experiences of members of the British and US communist parties.

Where you really misunderstand (or misrepresent) what I'm doing is when you say that "the party form, like the crowd, provides a mechanism for the individual to find meaning and reinterpret their identity." This isn't accurate because the first two chapters of the book dismantle the individual form. Even the quote from me that you use to support your point doesn't work because in the quoted passage I refer to communists in the plural. My point involves the way that the Party is a site of collective belonging that works back on the collectivity. There is no rediscovery of individuality -- the long section on Kristin Ross should make that clear. At any rate, my point is not that "its the ability to subsume individuals into a collective" that links crowd and party; it's that the party is the form that organizes fidelity to the egalitarian discharge of the crowd. By organizing this fidelity, it can hold open the gap opened up by the disruptive crowd event (and of course not all crowd events are disruptive).

Also, notice: it is not just participation in a crowd event that disrupts the interpellation of the subject as an individual. Rather (as chapter 1 argues), it is already the case that commanded individualism is over-burdening the fragile individual form. The extremes of contemporary capitalism are too much for individuals to bear (as I explain via the account of the changes in the individual form). So there are material reasons for the dissolution of this form today that should be understood not as pathologies (ala Turkle) but as indications of real contradictions.

I'm not sure what's at stake in your claim that I engage few contemporary authors other than predictably European ones. I'm tempted to think that you read in a different archive and I didn't refer to the people you like to read. But, the first chapter talks about a number of contemporary sociologists, I talk about Sherry Turkle, Kristin Ross, Judith Butler, John Holloway, Hardt and Negri, Eugene Holland and, yes, Althusser, Dolar, Zizek, Badiou.

You say I don't mention political science or any of the literature on parties - -there is an extensive discussion of Michels and notes to political scientists' commentary on Michels. You have a general dismissal that says looking at the literature on representation, democracy, and parties would benefit my scholarship. But you don't say how or in what way in would change my argument. It's interesting to note that by misstating the title of my 2009 book, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, you actually omit reference to a book where I do engage work in democratic theory. Again, I'm left thinking that basically you are just signaling that your archive is different from mine.

You mention that I reject identity politics. You don't mention my argument -- which is that identity today is fully saturated. It can't ground a politics. The claim for or attribution of an identity tells us nothing about a person's -- or a group's -- politics. (I'll add here that my first book was Solidarity of Strangers: feminism after identity politics, 1996). I emphasize as well that "the wide array of politicized issues and identities enables a communism that, more fully than ever before, can take the side of the oppressed, indeed, that can make the multiple struggles of the oppressed into a side."

It seems to me that you have one criticism: Dean rejects individuality. Yes, I do.

And then you end with an anti-communist gesture -- one that you link to recantations part of the history of anti-communism. But of course that does not sum or capture communism or anti-communism, so it strikes me as an odd kind of ideological signal.

March 04, 2017

The US is in a civil war, a civil war that is at its core a class war.

There are different terrains, forms of struggle and violence. Casualties come from different proximate causes -- police attacks, suicide, overdose, slow death from alcohol and despair, toxic environments, crashes and shooters -- but it's one war.

Terrains of struggle include streets and institutions, workplaces and domestic spaces, bodies and bathrooms, science and museums, churches, media, prison, farms, libraries, hospitals, and universities. There is no space external to this war.

The Left needs to defend whatever spaces we can. We have to make the cost of far right speech too high for them to continue it. The Right makes cultural gains by manipulating liberal ideas of tolerance and neutrality -- whether this is in the form of the white supremacism of Charles Murray and Milo or the climate denialist industry funded by the Koch brothers.

Liberal condemnation of the students who push back against these speakers when they comer to their campuses legitimate these speakers' views as worthy of consideration, as matters worth debating because reasonable people may disagree. Not only do most of these condemnations confuse protests against white supremacist speakers with state action (suggesting that there are liberals who can only think from a police perspective), but they proceed as if we were not in a civil war, a class war. They proceed as if society were a seminar or courtroom, not a war zone where people are daily under attack and where their attackers seek the cover of liberal institutions to justify these attacks.

Particularly incoherent is the way that so many liberals decry Trump as a fascist, yet remain unwilling to confront what this entails for so-called liberal practices and institutions, namely, that they are not functioning in a liberal society but are being made to serve fascist ends. This unwillingness suggests that either they don't really believe Trump is a fascist (and so their rhetoric is disingenuous), that they think that liberalism can defeat fascism (which has never happened), that they don't ideas seriously, or that arguments that some groups are genetically inferior are permissible liberal views.

Also galling is the way that resistance, protest, and "standing up and fighting back" is being championed by liberals and Democrats even as they quickly reject actual standing up and fighting back. Protests that remain controlled and symbolic are permitted. Direct action that shuts things down, that pushes back, that has effects is decried as too far. It appears, then, that for some liberals, protests are only early-stage campaign events, precursors to the only political acts they actually accept: writing letters, signing petitions, and the holy-of-holies, voting.

Some liberal arguments address tactics. They say that it’s a tactical mistake to protest far right speakers on college campuses because it gives conservative media fodder for criticism. Of course, right wing media will always attack the Left; they particularly like attacking liberals as leftists. The Left should welcome the attacks as opportunities to show we are fighting back and will continue to fight back. We should be the power the right fears, the power of the people as the rest of us, the oppressed against the oppressors, the many in solidarity against the few.

Liberals might care about being depicted as biased, not neutral. Anyone on the Left should take it as a matter of course that we are in no way neutral. The Right uses whatever opportunities they can get to spread their influence. We have to block them, shut them down, shut them out, refuse the pretense that we are in a rational debate between equally valid positions. We’re not.

November 21, 2016

"This online piecework, or “crowdwork,” represents a radical shift in how we define employment itself.

The individuals performing this work are of course not traditional employees, but neither are they freelancers. They are, instead, “users” or “customers” of Web-based platforms that deliver pre-priced tasks like so many DIY kits ready for assembly. Transactions are bound not by employee-employer relationships but by “user agreements” and Terms of Service that resemble software licenses more than any employment contract.

Researchers at Oxford University's Martin Programme on Technology and Employment estimate that nearly 30% of jobs in the U.S. could be organized like this within 20 years. Forget the rise of robots and the distant threat of automation. The immediate issue is the Uber-izing of human labor, fragmenting of jobs into outsourced tasks and dismantling of wages into micropayments.

In the U.S. and overseas, crowdwork payments can mean the difference between scraping by and saving for a home or working toward a degree. But as Riyaz Khan, a 32-year-old from a small town in the coastal state of Andhra Pradesh in India, discovered, doing work on spec posted by someone you'll never meet and who has no legal obligations to you has serious disadvantages.

My team at Microsoft Research spent two years studying the lives of hundreds of American and Indian crowdworkers like Khan to learn how they manage this nascent form of employment and the capriciousness that comes with it. Khan, when we met him, had spent three years finding work on Amazon Mechanical Turk. AMT is one of the largest online marketplaces that connect “providers” from around the world like Khan with “requesters,” typically U.S. or European businesses or individuals. He did tasks for companies as big as Google and as small as neighborhood print shops.

On good days, he made $40 in 10 hours — more than 100 times what neighboring farmers earned. He soon found more tasks than he could complete himself. So he hired locals to work with him out of his living room. In exchange for a cut of their pay, Khan helped his crew create their own accounts, taught them how to complete tasks efficiently, and ferreted out tasks that best matched his workers' skillsets. He also handled any final queries after the completed task was submitted. They called themselves Team Genius.

A decade ago, the Drug ­Enforcement Administration launched an aggressive campaign to curb a rising opioid epidemic that was claiming thousands of American lives each year. The DEA began to target wholesale companies that distributed hundreds of millions of highly addictive pills to the corrupt pharmacies and pill mills that illegally sold the drugs for street use.

Leading the campaign was the agency’s Office of Diversion Control, whose investigators around the country began filing civil cases against the distributors, issuing orders to immediately suspend the flow of drugs and generating large fines.

But the industry fought back. Former DEA and Justice Department officials hired by drug companies began pressing for a softer approach. In early 2012, the deputy attorney general summoned the DEA’s diversion chief to an unusual meeting over a case against two major drug companies.

“That meeting was to chastise me for going after industry, and that’s all that meeting was about,” recalled Joseph T. Rannazzisi, who ran the diversion office for a decade before he was removed from his position and retired in 2015.

Rannazzisi vowed after that meeting to continue the campaign. But soon officials at DEA headquarters began delaying and blocking enforcement actions, and the number of cases plummeted, according to on-the-record interviews with five former agency supervisors and internal records obtained by The Washington Post.

The judge who reviews the DEA diversion office’s civil caseload noted the plunge.

“There can be little doubt that the level of administrative Diversion enforcement remains stunningly low for a national program,” Chief Administrative Law Judge John J. Mulrooney II wrote in a June 2014 quarterly report obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

In fiscal 2011, civil case filings against distributors, manufacturers, pharmacies and doctors reached 131 before dropping to 40 in fiscal 2014, according to the Justice Department. The number of immediate suspension orders, the DEA’s strongest weapon of enforcement, dropped from 65 to nine during the same period.

“Things came to a grinding halt,” said Frank Younker, a DEA supervisor in the Cincinnati field office who retired in 2014 after 30 years with the agency. “I talked to my fellow supervisors, and we were all frustrated. It was ridiculous. I don’t know how many lives could have been saved if the process was done quicker.”

The slowdown began in 2013 after DEA lawyers started requiring a higher standard of proof before cases could move forward.

Top officials at the DEA and Justice declined to discuss the reasons behind the slowdown in the approval of enforcement cases. The DEA turned down requests by The Post to interview Mulrooney, acting DEA administrator Chuck Rosenberg, chief counsel Wendy H. Goggin and Rannazzisi’s replacement, Louis J. Milione.

“We implemented new case intake and training procedures for our administrative cases, increased the number of enforcement teams focused on criminal and civil investigations, restarted a successful drug take back program, and improved outreach to — and education efforts with — our registrant community.

“We have legacy stuff we need to fix, but we now have good folks in place and are moving in the right direction.”

The Justice Department, which oversees the DEA, declined requests to interview Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch and Deputy Attorney General Sally Q. Yates.

The department issued a statement saying that the drop in diversion cases reflects a shift from crackdowns on “ubiquitous pill mills” toward a “small group” of doctors, pharmacists and companies that continues to violate the law.

....

Drugs are manufactured by high-profile corporations such as Purdue Pharma. They rely on a lesser-known network of distributors, some of which are also multinational corporations. The distributors serve as middlemen, sending billions of doses of opioid pain pills to pharmacists, hospitals, nursing homes and pain clinics. The U.S. prescription opioid market generates $10 billion in annual sales.

There are thousands of distributors among the 1.6 million people and companies that hold DEA licenses to dispense drugs, but three of them — McKesson, Amerisource­Bergen and Cardinal Health — account for 85 percent of the drug shipments in the United States. These companies, which together collect about $400 billion in annual revenue, supply the corner pharmacist as well as giant medical centers.

For years, the DEA had taken a hands-off approach to the prescription drugs flowing out of the distributors. The companies had been reporting their drug sales inconsistently or not at all. They had been largely left alone as the DEA focused on doctors and pharmacies.

“The distributors had been ignored for years and years and years,” John J. Coleman, the third-ranking administrator at the DEA in the mid-1990s, said in a recent interview.

In 2005, the Office of Diversion Control, under Rannazzisi, launched its “Distributor Initiative” and briefed 76 companies about it. The new campaign pitted the DEA against an industry with close ties to lobbyists, lawyers and politicians in Washington.

On Sept. 27, 2006, the diversion office sent a letter to distributors across the country, reminding them that they were required by law to ensure that their drugs were not being diverted to the black market.

“Given the extent of prescription drug abuse in the United States, along with the dangerous and potentially lethal consequences of such abuse, even just one distributor that uses its DEA registration to facilitate diversion can cause enormous harm,” Rannazzisi wrote in the letter.

Five months later, D. Linden Barber, then-associate chief counsel for the DEA diversion office, wrote to DEA supervisors across the country, telling them to be vigilant. Abuse of prescription drugs, he said, had become “greater than the abuse of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.”

Under Rannazzisi’s initiative, distributors would have to monitor their sales in real time, withhold drug shipments if they detected suspicious activity and report those red flags to the DEA.

The diversion office deployed two weapons to ensure compliance. The first was an “order to show cause,” which permits investigators to begin a process to stop drug shipments from warehouses. The second was an “immediate suspension order,” which allows the DEA to instantly freeze shipments of narcotics from facilities where an “imminent threat” to public health exists. The immediate suspension order was especially dreaded by the distributors.

Younker, the former DEA supervisor in Cincinnati, said the agency had no other choice.

“The distributors could have stopped what was going on, but they didn’t,” he said. “They were doing the bare minimum. Why would you want to cut off a customer that’s paying you $2 million a year? They have sales reps and sales quotas and bonus structures and employees of the month. Everyone was making a lot of money.”

...

In late 2011, Rannazzisi’s office filed warrants to yet again inspect the records of a Cardinal warehouse. Investigators alleged that the company was overlooking escalating oxycodone orders from pharmacies in Florida. The DEA was also targeting four drugstores supplied by Cardinal in the state, including two CVS pharmacies.

Rannazzisi’s office obtained an internal Cardinal email from 2010 showing that the company’s own investigator had warned against selling narcotics to Gulf Coast Medical Pharmacy, an independent drugstore in Fort Myers, Fla., citing suspicions that the pills were winding up on the street.

Despite the warning, Cardinal hadn’t notified the DEA or cut off the supply of drugs.

Instead, the company shipped increasing quantities of pain pills to Gulf Coast. In 2011 alone, Cardinal sent more than 2 million doses of oxycodone to Gulf Coast. The wholesaler typically shipped 65,000 doses annually to comparable pharmacies.

...

That summer, lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry intensified on Capitol Hill. Several members of Congress, led by Reps. Tom Marino (R-Pa.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), were proposing a measure that critics said would undercut the DEA’s ability to hold drug distributors accountable.

Four major players lobbied heavily in favor of the legislation, called the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act. Together, McKesson, AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal and the distributors’ association, the Healthcare Distribution Alliance, spent $13 million lobbying House and Senate members and their staffs on the legislation and other issues between 2014 and 2016, according a Post analysis of lobbying records.

In July 2014, Rannazzisi was asked to explain his opposition to the bill in a conference call with congressional staffers.

“I said, ‘This bill passes the way it’s written we won’t be able to get immediate suspension orders, we won’t be able to stop the hemorrhaging of these drugs out of these bad pharmacies and these bad corporations,’ ” Rannazzisi recalled telling them. “ ‘What you’re doing is filing a bill that will protect defendants in our cases.’ ”

His remarks enraged Marino, the chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on regulatory reform.

In a Sept. 18, 2014, congressional hearing, Marino tore into then-DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart, Rannazzisi’s boss. By then, the legislation had passed the House; the bill was about to be introduced in the Senate.

October 05, 2016

"The theme for her show was “Invisible Clothes.” And in seeming contradiction to that idea, she offered some of the most outsize, extreme and extraordinary notions: kilts that were as enormous as a tent, trousers that could hold a veritable crowd within a single leg and a giant hood that took on the proportions of a sarcophagus. This wasn’t so much a line of clothes destined for your closet as it was a statement for the season — for the times."

"There were elements to these clothes that recalled past Kawakubo collections, such as their flatness, which reduces them to two-dimensions, their almost monstrous size and the sheer discombobulating nature of them. They are not, in literal terms, invisible.

In these enormous creations, you can often make out the silhouette of the body even as the garments extend far beyond it. It’s as if a child has pulled the bed sheets over his head and declared himself invisible even though the shape of his body can be seen beneath the blankets."

September 02, 2016

Some people may know that the person Jackie Stevens identifies as "Slammer" in her account of the outrageous proceedings at Northwestern University that have resulted in her being banned from campus pending examination by a university appointed psychiatrist posted an account of his own yesterday. Jackie has responded (see the link below). Among the complex politics of sex, race, sexuality, law, and academia running through these events -- or, better, which the university is using in an attempt to override tenure and punish an outspoken faculty member -- is the repeated use of tropes of mental illness and instability to characterize a woman who does not back down, who defends her position, who makes argument, and who is brave enough to take controversial positions. The language of fear, potential danger, and need for safety is used to bully and coerce.

Brand NU Response to Slammer

September 2, 2016

Yesterday, the colleague I called "Slammer" -- he slammed the door and then claimed I had a "break from reality" in reporting this -- posted his version of events on Facebook and shared this with a circle of overlapping "friends," many of whom are political scientists. Several forwarded it to me. Since he is not identifying himself publicly outside FB, I will continue to use his pseudonym.

There are two parts of his account that he weaves together such that his horrifying and life-altering experience of being lynched at the age of nine, unknown to me before yesterday, produces his experience of my scholarship within critical race theory, and my comments opposing certain sorts of faculty appointments (spousal hires), as "borderline racist." I hold no ill will against him for these beliefs, but I am outraged to learn that people in positions of authority at NU instrumentalized his anxieties to serve their goal of banning and firing me. These are simply not "feelings" on which a research university can rely for firing a tenured faculty member. I also now understand why no one at NU would share with me the basis of Slammer's fears of me--he reiterates on his FB page that he is "aboslutely afraid" of me: you cannot deny someone access to students and her office because someone claims her scholarship and views on academic governance make him afraid, even if this is accurate. Banning me is neither a legal nor helpful means of addressing this colleague's insecurities.

The WeedsAs my colleagues know, my opposition to spousal hires has nothing to do with race nor qualifications. As I pointed out, when the Office of the Inspector General attacked the Executive Office of Immigration Review for nepotism in the assignment of interns to immigration courts, the accusation was not that the children of headquarters' officials were untalented, but that the practice creates a climate of patronage inconsistent with the impartial handling of official business. I am concerned about the patronage implications of faculty spousal appointments, and how these arrangements may produce tacit expectations of quid pro quo with the administration.

This is a minority view in my department, perhaps just held by me. According to Socrates and John Stuart Mill, my colleagues should be grateful I am sharing this with them. This concern about the large number of spousal hires at NU is one I've voiced for several years. I realize many factors go into appointments and I may be wrong about this, but it is not a view that is insane, nor is it racist.

Before turning to the politics of sex, sexuality, race, law, academia, and much more running through all this, I want to focus on March 8.

I filed the complaint about these events on that date. The Chair, close friends with Slammer, and the Dean of Faculty, a former Department Chair, completely ignored my complaint, even though I pointed out a student witnessed this. The events I described were not visual but aural. Slammer yelled. Slammer slammed a door. These events make noise. You didn't need to see this to overhear it. Why not investigate threats to my safety, then and now, psychological and otherwise?

No one contacted me or the student. Here was a specific allegation of specific violations of NU policies, but no one bothered to follow up on my claim about being exposed to Slammer's aggression. The investigator was brought in much later, to investigate Slammer's claim that in reporting the incident, per NU policy, I had defamed him! The double standard is self-evident.

In the aftermath of March 8, I figured that Slammer would apologize. I was hopeful the episode would occasion bringing in a mediator to meet with members of my troubled subfield, as I had requested several times in the past. Slammer is right: the issues that divide us are not disagreements about the Buffett Institute, though Slammer has made statements avowing his long-standing support for the U.S. military, based, he wrote, on the honorable service of several generations of men in his family. That puts him on record as hostile to my own views on this. That is fine with me, but, as with his claims about our different views on portions of Black Political Theory, he may find this intolerable as well. (My request for a mediator has been rebuffed by two other members of my subfield, whose actions I believe are at the heart of this.)

To be clear on a point Slammer misconstrues: I never claimed that Slammer or other members of my department were provoked to claim they feel unsafe bcause of me because of my research and organizing on the Eikenberry appointment. I believe that they loathe me for reasons that are entirely indefensible in an academic community. Furthermore, the efforts by the anti-Jackie clique would be moot were it not for the fact that Board and Provost's office want me out of NU because of my ongoing research on NU's prominent role in the military-industrial-academic complex, research that uses undergraduate research assistants, as they know from my article about this.

(Among the far more egregious actual incidents of misconduct NU administrators have ignored was a Chair throwing a chair during a faculty meeting, one colleague told me. And where is the discipline for the Provost who demonstrably threatened someone might sue students who disapproved of his Eikenberry appointment?)

Please note that the student points out that he made this statement to the investigator and she omits it from her report.

Why did this happen? The person who conducted the investigation, Kathleen Rinehart, was brought in because she was close with NU's attorneys and specializes in how to fire tenured faculty. NU seems to be following her game plan, which, by the way, is to claim that faculty are "erratic," "disruptive," and so forth. According to Professor Stephen Eisenmann, who helped write NU's Faculty Handbook, the procedures Rinehart outlines are inconsistent with the Faculty Handbook. NU's attorneys seems to be ignoring NU's rules and following Rinehart's script. (See Barbara A. Lee, Kathleen Rinehart, "Dealing with Troublesome College Faculty and Staff: Legal and Policy Issues," Journal of College and University Law, 2011.)

That script requires someone who is incoherent, erratic, unbalanced, and so forth. I am not that. So they had to invent a paper version of me as though I am. And who better to do that than the co-author of the article on this, who was closely coordinating her investigation with the Department Chair, whose improprieties I also had challenged and reported?

Notice Slammer's claim that the my version of events indicate that I had a "break from reality."

What a weird claim. Slammer's PhD is in Politics, not Psychiatry. Why say I had a "break from reality," and not just that I lied? Also, is my psychosis contagious? Did the student who heard Slammer also have a "break from reality"?

If Slammer simply said I lied, then this would have to be characterized as a violation of a specific university policy. Discipline would require a specific charge and evidence that I lied, evidence that I could challenge in the Faculty Senate. I believe that Rinehart and other NU administrators were eliciting statements from Slammer and my Chair that they "feel unsafe" around me and to claim I "break from reality" to suit their legal strategy. NU's attorneys seem to believe that they may legally restrict my research and teaching in an indefinite time frame (the actions against me began at the end of April), without sharing with me any charges or evidence.

Slammer tells his FB friends not to credit my account of the events of March 8--they weren't there and shouldn't write in my support. But claiming I "broke from reality" is not a factual claim about what happened. It is a claim about the personality and psychology of the person who put forward a narrative other than the one Slammer and his clique who dislike me want to advance and can and should be refuted by evidence I am not someone who would ever "break from reality."

As recently as last Sunday, August 29, Associate Provost Lindsay Chase-Lansdale wrote to me: "Regarding your question about a review by the Committee on Cause, I would point out that no sanctions have been imposed to date." (NU's attorneys must be going nuts over the fact that Slammer in his FB post referenced the "recent disciplinary actions that Northwestern has taken against" me. This is evidence that clear the actions against me are indeed punitive and that the "safety" claims are a ruse.)

Chase-Lansdale states she will forward my request to the Committee on Cause after a new Chair is named, but this will be far too late for me for me to have the ban lifted in the near future. It likely means that my classes this fall will be canceled, which was the stated objective of the Provost's office and my Chair since the fall, 2015.

March 8, 2016: The Substance Slammer claims that I am a "disruptive person" and that in his position of Associate Chair, this became unbearable. The position of Associate Chair in my department carries few responsibilities that put the person holding this position, appointed by the Chair, in regular contact with other faculty.

In fact, the meeting on Mach 8 was the second of two interactions Slammer had with me as an Associate Chair the entire year. The first was in the fall, when I asked him to have the Advisory Committee consider for including on the Department agenda the fact that the Chair had cancelled the Department's election for Faculty Senate. He told me she "has her reasons" for this -- I believe it was to ensure I could not hold this position -- and that he was "close personal friends" with the Chair. On this basis he refused my request to raise this matter with the Advisory Committee.

In the end, it seems I was right to be suspicious of the reason Slammer provided me as to why he wanted to change my schedule; having me teach a seminar instead of the scheduled large lecture class would cause less havoc with student schedules. There is a third party involved (who did not request this change) but I can say that a) the rationale Slammer gave me is contradicted by the last five years of posted course schedules; b) it fits the timing for pushing me out in the fall. In an April 29, 2016 letter to the Dean of Faculty, the Chair of my department, who already had banned me from hiring undergraduate research assistants, writes: "removing [Stevens] from the workplace in advance of the start of the fall 2016 quarter is advisable, likely necessary."

The April 29 letter also states that "[Associate Provost] Lindsay [Chase-Lansdale] and I have been conferring all year" (emphasis added).

Paranoia The colleagues who wrote the Dean, as well as Slammer, call me paranoid. As one colleague in the Political Science Department told me recently, apparently I was not paranoid enough. I knew the Chair had cancelled the Department's fall election for the Faculty Senate after failing in her efforts to dissuade me to run. (The Chair and Slammer both intended he would assume that position without opposition; apparently fearing he would lose a department election, they cancelled it altogethe.) The Chair gave me an explanation that was clearly pretextual and resulted in the Department's Senator being an assistant professor who was on leave in France. The Chair also had instructed staff to lie to me about how they were handling the applications of students who were applying to work for me under the auspicies of the Farrell Fellow program.

Still, it never occurred to me that these people would spend months and months plotting with the Provost's office, NU's attorneys, and a hired gun to try to remove from campus a productive, respected colleague who was doing her job, including appropriately voicing questions and stating reasonable concerns on matters that bear on faculty self-governance and pedagogy.

More to come...

In the meantime, if you want to take a look at the scholarship informing my critique of Slammer's views on Black Political Thought, which came up just once as I recall, in the context of discussing the wording of a position request, please read my essay, "Recreating the State," which first appeared in a special issue of Third World Quarterly I co-edited with Richard Falk and Balakrishnan Rajagopal, Third World Quarterly, 27.5 (2006). This essay explores how essentialist identity politics of White and other racial, national, and ethnic groups consolidate nationalist, imperialist, racist state power, and points out the changing characteristics and dynamics of these subject positions as evidence for demanding critiques of nationalist insitutions that consolidate intergenerational identities, including those that may appear to be harbors of temporary safety for a few but that perpetuate systemic violence and inequality for most of us. A few years ago I was honored to learn that Angela Harris had selected this essay for incluion in her reader, Race and Equality in Law (Vermont, Ashgate: 2013).

September 01, 2016

Brand NU An Introduction

Northwestern University Bans Political Science Professor from Campus, Retaliation against Critic (September 2016)

At the end of July, with no warning and no specific charges or evidence of wrong-doing, Weinberg College Dean Adrian Randolph banned me from contact with students, including students not enrolled at Northwestern, and from the Northwestern campus, including my office and the libraries in Evanston and Chicago. The alleged rationale? Claims of faculty "feeling unsafe" around me, assertions untethered to any specific actions or statements on my part. These prohibitions are in place as I await my mandatory "fitness-for-duty" interview with an NU-chosen psychiatrist. And yet for over a month, NU has failed to provide the psychiatrist with the materials he needs to even schedule our interview. I recently learned that my Department Chair had been coordinating this event with the Provost's office since last fall, shortly after the publication of my article in Perspectives on Politicsoffering an unflattering portrait of Northwestern as exemplifying the military-industrial-academic complex. The fact that I played a key role in obstructing the appointment of a retired military officer whose leadership of the Buffett Institute for Global Studies was a hard fought for objective of NU's Board and administration must have hardened their resolve.

In 2010 I was hired as a full professor in the Political Science Department at Northwestern University, where I teach political and legal theory. I also am the founding director of the Deportation Research Clinic as well as a founding co-convener of a research working group on the Global Research University, both housed in the Buffett Institute for Global Studies at Northwesterrn University. In 2013-14 I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2014, I was the keynote speaker for the Association of Political Theory. In 2011 I received the Project Censored award for #4 of the Top 25 Censored Stories of 2010, for "America's Secret ICE Castles," an article revealing that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Fugitive Operations were being surreptitously run out of unmarked buildings in office parks across the country, as well as New York City's Chelsea Market, which also houses the Food Network. My scholarship, most recently on private prisons, also has been used in successful individual and class action lawsuits. For more on my work, please go here. For several years I also have been a scholar and critic of the militarization of political science. In 2015 I published in Perspectives on Politics an article exposing NU's militarized Board of Trustees, including Boeing's side contracts supporting Doha's "Education City," where NU runs a journalism school the U.S. State Department tasked with changing Al Jazeera's anti-U.S. coverage. Last year I was at ground zero of an effort by faculty, students, and alumni to block the appointment of retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry to run NU's Buffett Institute for Global Studies. Eikenberry didn't have a PhD or any peer-reviewed articles, but he did have excellent connections in the Department of Defense and State Department, not to mention China. The administrators said he'd help rotate NU faculty through government, like Harvard, they said. The CEOs and directors of Abbott Laboratories, Boeing, Caterpillar, and General Dynamics who run NU thought the China contacts would be good for business, a colleague with ties to the upper echelons of the administration told me. In mid-April, 2016 we were elated to learn that the private letters, public petition, and the resolution opposing the appointment two students introduced for consideration by the Associated Student Government worked! Instead of showing up in the fall, 2016, the Chicago Reader announced in mid-April: "Northwestern surrenders..." (Eikenberry later explained that he couldn't handle the criticism: "...opposition proved so persistent that Eikenberry decided in April to pull the plug," the Washington Post reported.) A jointly crafted, oddly worded press release conveyed NU's responsibility for not adequately managing the situation. The Chair of NU's Board of Trustees, William Osborn, told the Faculty Senate in June that the appointment was "not properly socialized." A dis-appointment, if you will. June brought another momentous announcement: Provost Dan Linzer was "stepping down," as NU's President Morton Schapiro phrased a decision widely understood as the Board firing Linzer for botching the Eikenberry appointment. The triumph of faculty and students over the administration and its Board was covered by the Washington Post, which exacerbated and actually called the episode an "embarassment" for NU's administration. And so it came to pass that by the end of July I learned I was next. As a number of collaborative projects with about a dozen students and recent graduates from NU and other campuses were humming along quite nicely (student names are pseudonyms)--e.g., Richard was coding FOIA litigation over redactions asserting claims of proprietary information or trade secrets; Diane was coding cases of Illegal Reentry with claims of U.S. citizenship; Maria was drafting a FOIA lawsuit to obtain contracts from the State Department; Margaret was doing legal research on historical criteria for evidence of U.S. citizenship; Mark was analyzing FOIA releases on ICE facility work programs; and I was advising Anne on her research comparing the FOIA law in England with that in the United States--Weinberg College Dean Adrian Randolph emailed to me a two-page letter with edicts banning me from campus, prohibiting me from all contact with students, including those enrolled elsewhere, and ... ordering me to undergo a mandatory fitness-for-duty examination with a psychiatrist chosen by Northwestern. The reason? Dean Randolph was just following up on reports he and my Chair helped stir up, the gist of which was that I might explode at any moment and cause a "blood bath" in Scott Hall. (Turns out Randolph had numerous reports claiming the opposite, including one from a student grateful for my support after the Provost let it be known Eikenberry might sue her for defamation. He disregarded each and every one of these.) Right. Completely outrageous. And yes, also surreal. If this reminds you of Stalin's Soviet Union you can join the chorus of my colleagues at NU who know me and, as importantly, know the folks behind this. Watching this unfold feels a bit like finding myself in the middle of the sort of twisted plot you'd encounter in "House of Cards," especially when I read the report of the pseudo-independent investigator NU hired. It turns out she's very close with several attorneys in NU's Office of General Counsel (OGC) and co-wrote an article on how to fire tenured faculty. Just for the record: I have never been diagnosed with a mental illness, nor prescribed psychotropic medications, nor even had this suggested to me. I also have never physically threatened much less assaulted anyone, anywhere; I have never made any statements to third parties threatening anyone else, anywhere; and the single factual allegation on which the Dean based his ban -- that I spoke "aggressively" and was "threatening" -- is from a faculty member whose aggressive conduct toward me was the reason the investigator was called in! Slammer That's right: I followed NU procedures and filed the complaint accurately pointing out my colleague's unprofessional conduct, but the investigator had arranged our meeting in a tiny windowless room adjacent a university police officer, due to her alleged concerns about her physical safety. Meanwhile, prior to meeting me, she met the guy who slammed the door -- let's call him Slammer -- in his office and with no adjacent police. Slammer, it turns out, was overheard by a student, who, on hearing yelling and a door slam, approached me and reflexively asked if I was okay and what happened. The student has signed a sworn statement that if called to do so he will testify in court that he heard a man's voice yelling, including "get out!", no other voice, and the door slamming, and that he told this to NU's investigator. In other words, there is one specific allegation of my actually doing something that supposedly made this guy (who is larger than me and has bragged about being an athlete) feel "threatened by" and "unsafe" around me and a student has signed a document stating he will give evidence under oath that will show this guy lied. Slammer has denied in writing raising his voice and stated that he closed the door quietly; my contemporaneous complaint stated that Slammer blew up, yelled at me, and slammed the door. NU's investigator reported the student "never actually saw anything," and omitted what the student told her that he heard. I know. Lots of head scratching. I must be leaving something out. I am. According to letters alleging I pose a risk to campus safety--authored by five members of the Department who are part of the administration and/or people about whose improprieties I had complained: "she is a 'No' vote on many matters before the Department"; I have a "bias against the military"; am "peculiar" (i.e., gender non-conforming, queer); "feel [I] can say anything"; am "disrespectful"; and "question [the] integrity" of the Chair (according to the Chair); and some students disliked how I ran a class. The documents shared with me purport to show wrongdoing, but contain not a single specific charge of any rule violation, even though NU's Faculty Handbook (pp. 30-31) requires this be shared with faculty prior to taking any actions that impede our research or teaching. The best this little clique can do to support the alleged fear of me is to reference several ridiculously petty and false allegations unrelated to physical safety, many involving third parties. The idea appears to be that if they can show I am unstable (by voting no, being "biased" against the military, questioning admissions decisions made by people who did not read most of the files, and so forth), that must mean I have a "borderline personality disorder," as one colleague suggested, and that must mean I will attack people physically. No one explains how I could have this severe, dangerous psychological disorder and yet have never actually threatened or harmed anyone. My favorite email is from a political scientist stating that the editor of the Daily Northwestern rejected a letter by a graduate student who supported the Eikenberry appointment and told the student it was because "Professor Stevens is a powerful person." This was the sole example this individual had to support his claim I posed a threat to students. In the end, the Daily published the student's letter. Or at least it published a letter by a Political Science graduate student (a major in the Air Force) claiming I was a "conspiracy theorist." And someone posted this letter on both ends of the hall in the Political Science Department when Eikenberry gave a talk, where the letters remained for some time thereafter. (Based on my research on the nation-state I object to militarism; so do the veterans who opposed Eikenberry's appointment, including Aaron Hughes, whose Tea Project at Northwestern was organized and supported in this same time-frame by several anti-Eikenberry faculty and students, myself included, as discussed in this Letter to the Daily.) Someone must have been pretty hard-pressed to step up for the administration if the best he could do to speak on behalf of apparently vulnerable students references nothing I have said or done. To be clear, outside the classroom I have no authority at all anywhere in the university, save that awarded by evidence and logical analysis--in this case documenting Eikenberry shilling for Rwandan political leaders the U.N. stated had perpetrated genocide and who were currently jailing and killing dissidents and journalists.

Why?

In response to the head-scratching as to why NU would undertake an action that is so blatantly bullying and hence damaging to its reputation -- as though it needs one more round of national publicity to add to its recent violations of academic freedom and speech (e.g., Laura Kipnis, "My Title IX Inquisition"; "U.S. Bioethicist Quits over Censorship Row at Northwestern University; and Provost Linzer threatening students opposing Eikenberry with a defamation lawsuit)-- my response is what I've been saying all along: NU is not a research university committed to the free exploration of ideas. It is an appendage of a military and corporate board that for close to a century has been using its authority to further a range of unsavory deals. Yes, inspiring research, scholarship, and teaching occur here. Every day I wake up excited to work with the wonderful colleagues and the students I have encountered here, including in the Political Science Department. The Mafia-owned Rao's restaurant served great food, but even a four star chef wouldn't last if the family felt its illicit deals were being exposed. In my view, the end game for NU is not a legal victory, but rather an effort to cloud my reputation by accusations of insanity. NU's Office of General Counsel is run by Philip Harris, who used to be a partner in the Chicago law firm that for decades represented General Dynamics and the Crown family. Harris is well-aware of my research into the financial and personal ties that reflect poorly on the Board, most as yet unpublished. Harris, instead of recusing himself because of the appearance of his own conflicts of interest in my case was, and I assume still is, overseeing the current actions pursued against me. My view is that the individuals behind this care more about their own reputations than that of NU and are thus willing to sacrifice the latter in a pathetic attempt to discredit as a "conspiracy theory" my disclosures. Alas, the actions these attorneys and administrators are pursuing will bring a great deal of unnecessary and unflattering attention to the Political Science Department, whose faculty and students do not deserve this. My reporting is my reporting and I imagine people will decide on the basis of the evidence whether my analysis of NU is correct or off base. Likewise, I have no intention of relinquishing my responsibilities for faculty self-governance, including challenging and reporting, in accordance with NU's policy, conduct that I find unprofessional or abusive. That said, this is a shot across the bow to all faculty, tenured and otherwise, that you should be worried about being harassed if not fired by an unaccountable officialdom disloyal to Northwestern's research and teaching mission. (First the Chair and Dean prevented me from paying the undergraduates; and in July, when the students were working with me for no pay, the Dean shut down our work entirely.)

Now What?

Can you fire, or even ban, a tenured professor because of the junior high school antics of a few bullies asserting that they are the ones "feeling threatened" and "unsafe"? Common sense, NU's Faculty Handbook, employment law, and my lawyer, say "Are you kidding? No way!" This is such a transparent ploy to retaliate against me for inquiries into unsavory actions by political science faculty and the university that my colleagues and the former students with whom I have discussed this to date concur: it's going to waste a lot of time and money, cause a huge distraction, and I will keep my job. The next step is a mandatory interview with an NU-selected psychiatrist. However, it is over a month since I received the letter and I cannot even schedule an appointment; Northwestern failed to send the documents the psychiatrist needs to schedule this. This delay seems consistent with the Chair's stated goal of keeping me off campus for the fall quarter and, as I read her letter to the Dean, eventually to fire me. Fortunately, I have the support of colleagues and former students at Northwestern and elsewhere who are shocked and disgusted by these transparently retaliatory and thuggish tactics. Again, I assure everyone reading this that there is nothing I have ever said or done that would justify, even remotely, this treatment.

How Can I Help?

Email to Northwestern, short is fine, from people who know me and simply can vouch they have never known me as unbalanced, retaliatory, or physically threatening in any way would be extremely helpful. To date Randolph has completely disregarded positive letters--he omitted any reference to them in his summaries or his August 17, 2016 letter for the psychiatrist-- but perhaps if they are tallied in the dozens or more this will make a difference. Please write to Dean Adrian Randolph (weinberg-dean@northwestern.edu) and copy my attorney Rima Kapitan (rkapitan@kapitanlaw.net). Thank you!

August 28, 2016

Facebook, in the years leading up to this election, hasn’t just become nearly ubiquitous among American internet users; it has centralized online news consumption in an unprecedented way. According to the company, its site is used by more than 200 million people in the United States each month, out of a total population of 320 million. A 2016 Pew study found that 44 percent of Americans read or watch news on Facebook. These are approximate exterior dimensions and can tell us only so much. But we can know, based on these facts alone, that Facebook is hosting a huge portion of the political conversation in America.

The Facebook product, to users in 2016, is familiar yet subtly expansive. Its algorithms have their pick of text, photos and video produced and posted by established media organizations large and small, local and national, openly partisan or nominally unbiased. But there’s also a new and distinctive sort of operation that has become hard to miss: political news and advocacy pages made specifically for Facebook, uniquely positioned and cleverly engineered to reach audiences exclusively in the context of the news feed. These are news sources that essentially do not exist outside of Facebook, and you’ve probably never heard of them. They have names like Occupy Democrats; The Angry Patriot; US Chronicle; Addicting Info; RightAlerts; Being Liberal; Opposing Views; Fed-Up Americans; American News; and hundreds more. Some of these pages have millions of followers; many have hundreds of thousands.

Using a tool called CrowdTangle, which tracks engagement for Facebook pages across the network, you can see which pages are most shared, liked and commented on, and which pages dominate the conversation around election topics. Using this data, I was able to speak to a wide array of the activists and entrepreneurs, advocates and opportunists, reporters and hobbyists who together make up 2016’s most disruptive, and least understood, force in media.

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic. And unlike traditional media organizations, which have spent years trying to figure out how to lure readers out of the Facebook ecosystem and onto their sites, these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.

...

This year, political content has become more popular all across the platform: on homegrown Facebook pages, through media companies with a growing Facebook presence and through the sharing habits of users in general. But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms. These are professional Facebook users straining to build media companies, in other words, not the other way around.

From a user’s point of view, every share, like or comment is both an act of speech and an accretive piece of a public identity. Maybe some people want to be identified among their networks as news junkies, news curators or as some sort of objective and well-informed reader. Many more people simply want to share specific beliefs, to tell people what they think or, just as important, what they don’t. A newspaper-style story or a dry, matter-of-fact headline is adequate for this purpose. But even better is a headline, or meme, that skips straight to an ideological conclusion or rebuts an argument.

...

“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”

In retrospect, Facebook’s takeover of online media looks rather like a slow-motion coup. Before social media, web publishers could draw an audience one of two ways: through a dedicated readership visiting its home page or through search engines. By 2009, this had started to change. Facebook had more than 300 million users, primarily accessing the service through desktop browsers, and publishers soon learned that a widely shared link could produce substantial traffic. In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.

This was, for most news organizations, a boon. The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.

Facebook, from a publisher’s perspective, had seized the web’s means of distribution by popular demand. A new reality set in, as a social-media network became an intermediary between publishers and their audiences. For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.

From the start, some publishers cautiously regarded Facebook as a resource to be used only to the extent that it supported their existing businesses, wary of giving away more than they might get back. Others embraced it more fully, entering into formal partnerships for revenue sharing and video production, as The New York Times has done. Some new-media start-ups, most notably BuzzFeed, have pursued a comprehensively Facebook-centric production-and-distribution strategy. All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.

The news feed is designed, in Facebook’s public messaging, to “show people the stories most relevant to them” and ranks stories “so that what’s most important to each person shows up highest in their news feeds.” It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.

August 21, 2016

White women between 25 and 55 have been dying at accelerating rates over the past decade, a spike in mortality not seen since the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. According to recent studies of death certificates, the trend is worse for women in the center of the United States, worse still in rural areas, and worst of all for those in the lower middle class. Drug and alcohol overdose rates for working-age white women have quadrupled. Suicides are up by as much as 50 percent.

White women have been dying prematurely at higher rates since the turn of this century, passing away in their 30s, 40s and 50s in a slow-motion crisis driven by decaying health in small-town America, according to an analysis of national health and mortality statistics by The Washington Post.

Among African Americans, Hispanics and even the oldest white Americans, death rates have continued to fall. But for white women in what should be the prime of their lives, death rates have spiked upward. In one of the hardest-hit groups — rural white women in their late 40s — the death rate has risen by 30 percent.

The Post’s analysis, which builds on academic research published last year, shows a clear divide in the health of urban and rural Americans, with the gap widening most dramatically among whites. The statistics reveal two Americas diverging, neither as healthy as it should be but one much sicker than the other.

In modern times, rising death rates are extremely rare and typically involve countries in upheaval, such as Russia immediately after the collapse of the Soviet Union. In affluent countries, people generally enjoy increasingly long lives, thanks to better cancer treatments; drugs that lower cholesterol and the risk of heart attacks; fewer fatal car accidents; and less violent crime.

But progress for middle-aged white Americans is lagging in many places — and has stopped entirely in smaller cities and towns and the vast open reaches of the country. The things that reduce the risk of death are now being overwhelmed by things that elevate it, including opioid abuse, heavy drinking, smoking and other self-destructive behaviors.

White men are also dying in midlife at unexpectedly high rates. But the most extreme changes in mortality have occurred among white women, who are far more likely than their grandmothers to be smokers, suffer from obesity or drink themselves to death.

White women still outlive white men and African Americans of both sexes. But for the generations of white women who have come of age since the 1960s, that health advantage appears to be evaporating.

Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years. The reason these early deaths are so conspicuous among white women, these experts say, is that in the past the members of this comparatively privileged group have been unlikely to die prematurely.

Laudy Aron, a researcher with the Urban Institute, said rising white death rates show that the United States’ slide in overall health is not being driven simply by poor health in historically impoverished communities.

“You can’t explain it away as, ‘It’s those people over there who are pulling us down,’ ” Aron said. “We’re all going down.”

For this article, The Post examined death records from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, breaking the information down geographically, county by county, by level of urbanization and by cause of death.

Big cities and their suburbs — metropolitan areas of more than 1 million people — looked strikingly different from the rest of the country. The Post divided these populations into urban and rural categories, with the rural population encompassing smaller cities as well as small towns and the most remote places.

The statistics show decaying health for all white women since 2000. The trend was most dramatic for women in the more rural areas. There, for every 100,000 women in their late 40s, 228 died at the turn of this century. Today, 296 are dying. And in rural areas, the uptick in mortality was noticeable even earlier, as far back as 1990. Since then, death rates for rural white women in midlife have risen by nearly 50 percent.

In the hardest-hit places — 21 counties arrayed across the South and Midwest — the death rate has doubled, or worse, since the turn of the century for white women in midlife.

In Victoria County, Tex., a rural area near the Gulf Coast, deaths among women 45 to 54 have climbed by 169 percent in that time period, the sharpest increase in that age group of any U.S. county. The death rate climbed from 216 per 100,000 people to 583.

Lisa Campbell, medical director for the Victoria County health department, said a third of adults in the county are obese, roughly in line with the national average. Also, 1 in 5 smokes — well above the national average — and people can still light up in restaurants and other public places.

Campbell said she has been struck by how many white women she knows who have some kind of cancer.

“It’s kind of weird, actually,” she said.

...

Researchers circled the dying-whites phenomenon for several years before clearly recognizing what they were seeing. In 2014, the increase in the death rate of relatively young white women was right there in the CDC’s massive annual report on American health, but it drew no comment in the introductory highlights. Readers had to scrutinize Table 23 on Page 109 to spot the trend.

Other reports were more explicit. A 2013 study at the University of Wisconsin looked at the geography of death and discovered that mortality for women of all races had risen in 43 percent of U.S. counties between 1992 and 2006. Men’s mortality had risen in only 3 percent of counties.

Also in 2013, a sweeping study, “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health,” from the National Research Council and the National Academies’ Institute of Medicine showed a broad “health disadvantage” among Americans, compared with people in other affluent countries.

Aron, the Urban Institute researcher who co-authored the study, wrote in January 2014 that “increases in mortality are especially pronounced among white women of reproductive age, not a group we generally think of as being disadvantaged.” Last year, she and two co-authors published a separate article highlighting the perplexing number of white women who are dying prematurely.

Then, in November, Case and her husband, Angus Deaton, another Princeton economics professor, published their paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Deaton had recently won the Nobel Prize in economics, an honor that added media gloss to the dying-whites study. Suddenly, it was a national story.

Other researchers weighed in, debating aspects of the Case-Deaton statistical analysis. For example, their study played down differences in gender; Case and Deaton contend that the noticeably higher death rates for women were largely driven by smoking patterns.

August 04, 2016

"In 2015, four of the world’s top 10 Internet companies ranked by market capitalization were Chinese, according to the data website Statista. China is now the world leader in e-commerce, with ordinary Chinese using their phones to invest, buy groceries or pay for street food."

...

In the past five years, China’s Internet population has soared. There are now almost 700 million Chinese Web users, about 20 percent of the world’s Internet users.

...

The focus on beauty and self-expression resonates in particular with Chinese women, who are a rising consumer force. A 2012 Boston Consulting Group report estimated that female earnings in China will grow from $350 billion in 2000 to $4 trillion in 2020.

“Meitu sits at the intersection of two exploding forces: Chinese mobile use and rising Chinese women,” said Jeffrey Towson, a professor of investment at Peking University in Beijing.

“I don’t know if they saw that coming, but they went with it.”

...

“Nowadays, when girls go out, it just means finding a place to take pictures and post them on social media,” she said.

Though you’d think that an app designed to “beautify” your face might inspire feelings of inadequacy, superfans insist it gives them confidence, providing an escape from real-world pressure.

August 02, 2016

Lately we've seen more examples of liberal erasure of the left via the equating of left and right. A couple of years ago, my friend Korinna Patelis wrote a brilliant article on this phenomena in Greece that we published in Theory & Event. In the UK, this erasure manifest in the occlusion of Lexit and subsequent ceding of the terms and terrain of Brexit to the right. In the US, we've seen this most recently in liberal equating of any critique of HRC with a right-wing attack.

The basic move begins with the claim that HRC isn't trusted because she has been attacked from the right for over thirty years. Liberal feminists repeat this trope, adding the point that the basis of right-wing attacks is sexism. HRC herself furthers this narrative as she says she recognizes that people have a hard time trusting her, that she has to earn this trust, and that this is hard because of the decades of attacks from the right.

But the fact that the right attacks her and that some of these attacks are sexist does not mean that all attacks are from the right and that all attacks are sexist. Attacks from the left emphasize her involvement in the coup in Haiti, her militarist adventurism in Libya, her support for war in Iraq, her embrace of Israel, for starters. When liberals ignore these facts of HRC's political position, when they erase the critique, they are implicitly supporting these positions. Coups, regime change, imperialism are reinforced as the bedrock set of liberal positions.

The same holds for big money in politics, the rule of finance capital, and the buttressing of oligarchy. The liberal equation of all attacks on HRC (or the Democrats or Obama) with right wing attacks negates the left, It doesn't consider or engage left arguments, it doesn't tolerate them, it erases them as left, proceeding as if they did not exist at all.

July 29, 2016

If I were Buzzfeed, I would write a list of the 27 things that most depress me about the HRC nomination. But I'm not Buzzfeed and I prefer anger to depression.

I'm disgusted by the manipulation of feminist goals to generate support for imperialism. This isn't new. The critique of liberal feminism has been well-known for decades. And yet its explicit suspension is disavowed by those who want us to all share in the excitement of breaking the glass ceiling. I don't share it. I feel nothing but rage. Thatcher was not a victory for women. Neither is Clinton.

I'm appalled by the falling into line of ostensibly progressive intellectuals who not only seem to have suspended all their critical capacities as they repeat the elements of the very politics they ostensibly reject -- unity, nationalism, demonization of dissent, paranoia -- but who ignore HRC's actual record as if the wars and coups she has furthered, the deaths for which she is responsible, do not matter.

I'm shocked that critical intellectuals parrot the worst elements of mainstream media and Clinton talking-points, failing to analyze the convention, its pageantry, and its speeches as an ideological production designed to create an appearance and a feeling. Somehow ideas of the partition of the perceptible have fallen away before fawning over attractive people, rhetorically well-constructed speeches, and balloon drops.

Well, actually, the balloon drop was really great. Endless. Abundant. Different sizes. And some had stars. I loved the balloon drop. I wish I was in there, too, surrounded by thousands and thousands of balloons. Maybe, like Bill, I could grab a big blue with stars and take it home. Or bounce the big red and white ones back into the crowds. And then confetti.